News StoriesExcerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media
Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
In the Air Force, drone pilots did not pick the targets. That was the job of someone pilots called "the customer." The customer might be a conventional ground force commander, the C.I.A. or a classified Special Operations strike cell. [Drone operator] Captain Larson described a mission in which the customer told him to track and kill a suspected Al Qaeda member. Then, the customer told him to use the Reaper's high-definition camera to follow the man's body to the cemetery and kill everyone who attended the funeral. In December 2016, the Obama administration loosened the rules. Strikes once carried out only after rigorous intelligence-gathering and approval processes were often ordered up on the fly, hitting schools, markets and large groups of women and children. Before the rules changed, [former Air Force captain James] Klein said, his squadron launched about 16 airstrikes in two years. Afterward, it conducted them almost daily. Once, Mr. Klein said, the customer pressed him to fire on two men walking by a river in Syria, saying they were carrying weapons over their shoulders. The weapons turned out to be fishing poles. Over time, Mr. Klein grew angry and depressed. Eventually, he refused to fire any more missiles. In 2020, he retired, one of many disillusioned drone operators who quietly dropped out. "We were so isolated," he said. "The biggest tell is that very few people stayed in the field. They just couldn't take it." Bennett Miller was an intelligence analyst, trained to study the Reaper's video feed. In late 2019 ... his team tracked a man in Afghanistan who the customer said was a high-level Taliban financier. For a week, the crew watched the man feed his animals, eat with family in his courtyard. Then the customer ordered the crew to kill him. A week later, the Taliban financier's name appeared again on the target list. "We got the wrong guy. I had just killed someone's dad," Mr. Miller said. "I had watched his kids pick up the body parts." In February 2020, he ... was hospitalized, diagnosed with PTSD and medically retired. Veterans with combat-related injuries, even injuries suffered in training, get special compensation worth about $1,000 per month. Mr. Miller does not qualify, because the Department of Veterans Affairs does not consider drone missions combat. "It's like they are saying all the people we killed somehow don't really count," he said. "And neither do we."
Note: Captain Larson took his own life in 2020. Furthermore, drones create more terrorists than they kill. Read about former drone operator Brandon Bryant's emotional experience of killing a child in Afghanistan that his superiors told him was a dog. For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of revealing news articles on war.
The Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 (CSPA) should be fairly straightforward: The law bans the United States from providing military assistance or arms sales to governments that use children in combat. Simply put, if a country's government uses child soldiers, it cannot receive military support from the United States.Except several countries that use child soldiers do. This is because of a loophole in the child soldiers ban called a "national interest waiver," which allows the president to bypass the law if it is deemed in the U.S. national interest to do so. For the past five years, the State Department has compiled an annual list of governments known to recruit and use children as soldiers called the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) list. Yet countries on this list have been denied only a smattering of military support–in many cases, military arms and assistance were provided to countries identified by the United States as using child soldiers. For instance, last year full waivers were granted to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Somalia. All of these countries are guilty of putting children in combat. The U.S. government's failure to apply the CSPA uniformly and consistently detracts from its commitment to protect the rights of children globally. Ultimately, no amount of "national interest" should stand in the way of pressuring abusive governments to end grave violations against children, including war crimes. By not listing all forces that egregiously violate children's rights, the United States is sending a message that abuse can be justified under certain circumstances. Surely, this can't be right.
For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has proposed to negotiate with the U.S., this time in proposals made by President Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2024. Four previous times, the U.S. rejected the offer of negotiations. The 30-year U.S. project, hatched originally by Cheney and the neocons ... has been to weaken or even dismember Russia, surround Russia with NATO forces, and depict Russia as the belligerent power. [One] Russian proposal for negotiations came from Putin following the violent overthrow of Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, with the active complicity if not outright leadership of the U.S. government. The post-coup government invited me for urgent economic discussions. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was told directly about U.S. funding of the Maidan protest. The violent coup induced the ethnic-Russia Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine to break from the coup leaders, many of whom were extreme Russophobic nationalists, and some in violent groups with a history of Nazi SS links in the past. Almost immediately, the coup leaders took steps to repress the use of the Russian language even in the Russian-speaking Donbas. The government in Kiev [deployed] neo-Nazi paramilitary units and U.S. arms. In the course of 2014, Putin called repeatedly for a negotiated peace, and this led to the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015 based on autonomy of the Donbas and an end to violence by both sides. Russia did not claim the Donbas as Russian territory, but instead called for autonomy and the protection of ethnic Russians within Ukraine. The UN Security Council endorsed the Minsk II agreement, but the U.S. neocons privately subverted it.
Note: More than 1 million people on both sides have been either killed or injured. This article was written by Jeffrey Sachs, world-renowned economist and public policy analyst. This isn't about defending Russia, but highlighting how US foreign policy has exploited Ukraine for strategic interests–fueling ongoing conflict rather than promoting peace. Azov Battalian is a neo-nazi group tied to credible human rights violations, a group that the CIA directly supported with weapons and military training leading up to the 2014 Maidan coup.
Children on top of rubble… playing with ammunition casings. A close look reveals where they come from -- printed on the side: USA... DOD for the Department of Defence. Hala Rharrit was an American diplomat who ... worked on human rights and counterterrorism. Part of her job was to monitor Arab press and social media to document how America's role in the war was perceived in the Middle East. Daily reports Rharrit sent to senior leadership in Washington [contained] gruesome images: Hala Rharrit: "I would show the complicity that was indisputable. Fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of ... mostly children. And that's the devastation. It's been overwhelmingly children ... I would show images of children that were starved to death. I was basically berated, 'Don't put that image in there. We don't wanna see it.'" Three months into the war ... she was told her reports were no longer needed. The U.S. has sent $18 billion in American military assistance to Israel since the war began, largely in the form of taxpayer-funded weapons. Most of the bombs come from America. Most of the technology comes from America. And all of the fighter jets, all of Israel's fixed-wing fleet - comes from America. Andrew Miller was the deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs. He ... has since become the highest ranking Biden administration official to go public with his concerns about the U.S. role in the war. The State Department issued a report saying it is "reasonable to assess" that Israel may have used American weapons in violation of international law. Hala Rharrit: "Protests began erupting in the Arab world ... with people burning American flags. We worked so hard after the war on terror to strengthen ties with the Arab world."
Note: A new study shows that death feels imminent for 96% of children in Gaza. War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.
The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, the Pentagon's top research arm, wants to find out if red blood cells could be modified in novel ways to protect troops. The DARPA program, called the Red Blood Cell Factory, is looking for researchers to study the insertion of "biologically active components" or "cargoes" in red blood cells. The hope is that modified cells would enhance certain biological systems, "thus allowing recipients, such as warfighters, to operate more effectively in dangerous or extreme environments." Red blood cells could act like a truck, carrying "cargo" or special protections, to all parts of the body, since they already circulate oxygen everywhere, [said] Christopher Bettinger, a professor of biomedical engineering overseeing the program. "What if we could add in additional cargo ... inside of that disc," Bettinger said, referring to the shape of red blood cells, "that could then confer these interesting benefits?" The research could impact the way troops battle diseases that reproduce in red blood cells, such as malaria, Bettinger hypothesized. "Imagine an alternative world where we have a warfighter that has a red blood cell that's accessorized with a compound that can sort of defeat malaria," Bettinger said. In 2019, the Army released a report called "Cyborg Soldier 2050," which laid out a vision of the future where troops would benefit from neural and optical enhancements, though the report acknowledged ethical and legal concerns.
Note: Read about the Pentagon's plans to use our brains as warfare, describing how the human body is war's next domain. Learn more about biotech dangers.
In a landmark verdict cheered by human rights defenders around the world, a federal jury in Virginia found a U.S. military contractor liable for the torture of three prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison during the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early 2000s. The jury ordered CACI Premier Technology to pay each of the three Iraqi plaintiffs $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million in punitive damages, for a total of $42 million. It is the first time that a civilian contractor has been found legally responsible for abusing Abu Ghraib detainees. The lawsuit against CACI–filed in 2008 by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of Suhail Al Shimari, Asa'ad Al Zuba'e, and Salah Al-Ejaili–alleged that company officials conspired with U.S. military personnel in subjecting the plaintiffs to torture and other crimes. Dozens of Abu Ghraib detainees died in U.S. custody, some of them as a result of being tortured to death. Abu Ghraib prisoners endured torture ranging from rape and being attacked with dogs to being forced to eat pork and renounce Islam. A separate U.S. Army report concluded that most Abu Ghraib prisoners were innocent, with the Red Cross estimating that between 70-90% of inmates there were wrongfully detained. These include women who were held as bargaining chips to induce suspected militants to surrender. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the prison's commanding officer, was demoted. No other high-ranking military officer faced accountability for the abuse.
Note: Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.
Last year, the US Commission on National Defense Strategy published its final report, creating intense buzz in Washington. "The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945," the report warned. To meet the challenge, "the US government needs to harness all elements of national power," starting with a 5% boost to the Pentagon budget, currently at $886 billion. Congress created the bipartisan commission as "an independent body." Yet some of the members of the commission are connected to think tanks and the defence contractors that fund them: from Boeing to General Electric, Northrop Grumman to Lockheed Martin. If taxpayers go along with the military buildup advocated by the report, these and other firms stand to profit handsomely. The Atlantic Council recently published its own nuclear report, which called for boosting funding for missile-defense technologies. The Atlantic Council has received at least $10 million from major Pentagon contractors that manufacture nuclear weapons and missile-defense systems. There are so many reports paid for by vested interests, commissions on which they sit, and governments getting their piece, it's hard to keep track. Consider Michèle Flournoy, a former Pentagon official who founded the Center for New American Security and sits on its board. CNAS published a report in September titled "Integration for Innovation" as part of its "defense technology task force." Executives from RTX (which contributed at least $450,000 to CNAS), Lockheed Martin ($600,000), Palantir ($175,000), Leidos ($300,000), and Booz Allen ($250,000) all directly contributed as members of the task force, even as they benefit from every single proposal in it.
Note: Learn more about arms industry corruption in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.
In 2023, the Government Accountability Office revealed that a government contractor had lost 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, together worth tens of millions of dollars, since 2018. The Department of Defense followed up on only 20,000 of those parts. Military officials don't know how many F-35 spare parts exist in total, paid for by American taxpayers but spread out at contractor warehouses around the world. The 1985 aircraft carrier scandal continued this pattern of failure to keep track of valuable materiel. After a group of smugglers was caught stealing F-14 parts to sell to Iran, the Pentagon ran an audit on the spare parts stored on aircraft carriers. Auditors found the Navy had lost track of $394 million in parts between 1984 and 1985. Not to worry! It turns out only about $7 million in parts had been stolen by the gunrunners, and the remaining $387 million were misidentified or misplaced. Perhaps the most infamous cases of waste occurred in Afghanistan, where the United States spent 20 years trying to prop up a friendly Afghan government only to have Taliban rebels sweep the capital in a lightning-quick August 2021 offensive. Although the U.S. military extracted all of its own gear, it left $7.12 billion of American-provided equipment with the doomed Afghan army; it soon fell into the Taliban's hands. Images of Taliban fighters riding around with captured vehicles became a symbol of American failure.
Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.
In October 2024, an unknown man stepped out of the shadows, arriving in our nation's capital to deliver an important message about what the public calls "UFOs" and what the government calls "UAPs," or unidentified aerial phenomena. His name is Jacob Barber, and he says for the past 30 years, he's worked in both an official and unofficial capacity for the United States government and its partners in the intelligence community. Barber ... says he was part of that covert program that worked with alien spacecraft for years. NewsNation checked Barber's records and confirmed that he was an airman in the U.S. Air Force who worked as an aerospace mechanic in the late 1990s. He was also recruited into Air Force Special Operations. Barber said his team recovered "things that were exotic in nature." "I was a helicopter pilot, and I operate with a 150-to-200-foot-long line. So, I got within 150 feet of this object," he said. That's when he saw it. "I saw an egg, a white egg," he said. "There was no engine. There was no thermal signature. I was operating at night when I finally came in to pick it up. So, I'm working under night vision goggles at the time, and it was quite clear. I flipped them up, flipped them down and looked at it a couple of different ways." Barber said the "metallic, pearly white" object was about the size of an SUV. "I can tell you that the reaction by my team ... we all knew we were dealing with something extraordinary," he said.
Note: See this latest UFO footage for yourself. Then watch our latest video on UFO disclosure exploring the big picture behind this fascinating topic. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on UFOs. Then explore the comprehensive resources provided in our UFO Information Center.
On Friday, March 8, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy in a Manhattan federal court. Extradited to the United States shortly after completing his second presidential term in 2022, the 55-year-old Hernández is up against a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in jail. US Attorney General Merrick Garland accused Hernández of having run Honduras as a "narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity". Hernández was until very recently a good chum of successive US administrations, which appointed him a vital ally in the so-called "war on drugs" and flung money at Honduras accordingly. The messianically right-wing leader came to power five years after the 2009 US-facilitated coup d'Ă©tat against Manuel Zelaya. The fabricated pretext for the coup ... was that Zelaya was scheming to remain president of Honduras in violation of the constitutional one-term limit. Later this limit was quickly dispensed with in order to enable the continued reign of Hernández. Post-election protests triggered a characteristically lethal response from Honduran security forces, which didn't stop the US from continuing to fund those very same forces. The CIA's narco-operations have spanned the globe from Pakistan to Laos to Venezuela, while many an international narco-politician has – like Hernández – found at least fleeting favour with the US government.
Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.
In 2016, Flaviu Georgescu was found guilty and sentenced of attempting to traffic weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, an insurgent group on the U.S. terror list. But when he was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration agents, he told the officials he was working for the CIA. The majority of defendants in post-9/11 terrorist cases had no actual ties to terrorism or to terrorist organizations. Many were caught in FBI stings, where informants posed as terrorists often crossing the line into encouraging and even facilitating crimes that would otherwise not have occurred. As the war on terror has waned, the DOJ has shifted its focus, with its agencies – including the DEA – now targeting people for similar sting operations on allegations of involvement in so-called "narcoterrorism." The FBI ... would identify someone who was espousing views that might be sympathetic to those organizations, or even an attack, and they would encourage that person to get involved. Some of the targets of investigations were very financially desperate. The FBI, through the informant, would dangle the opportunity to make money. In those cases, the vast majority of people have no connections to real terrorist groups, they have no access to weapons. And the FBI provides everything. A bomb, grenades, automatic rifles ... guns that would be very difficult to obtain, even by sophisticated criminals. When the defendant goes about to use the weapon, they're arrested, and they're charged, and announced to the public as a terrorist who was about to get involved in this very deadly plot were it not foiled by the FBI. The Intercept [documents] these cases through Trial and Terror. We've seen hundreds of these cases involving sting operations since 9/11. What this has done ... in the post-9/11 era, was really exaggerate the threat of terrorism from within Muslim communities in the United States. And, on the news, it really made the public think that the threat of terrorism within the United States from these communities was much, much greater than it really was.
Note: The FBI has had a notorious history of manufacturing terrorist plots, often targeting vulnerable minors who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities yet no history of harming anyone. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.
The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces "don't fight drug traffickers", a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead "they try to manage the drug trade". "It's like pest control companies," Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, [said]. "If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job." Under the Merida Initiative, the US Congress has approved more than $1.4bn in drug war aid for Mexico, providing attack helicopters, weapons and training for police and judges. "It's true, they want to control it," a mid-level official with ... Mexico's equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security, told Al Jazeera of the CIA and DEA's policing of the drug trade. JesĂşs Zambada Niebla, a leading trafficker from the Sinaloa cartel currently awaiting trial in Chicago, has said he was working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency during his days as a trafficker, and was promised immunity from prosecution. "Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of [Jesus Zambada's] father, Ismael Zambada and â€Chapo' Guzmán were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tonnes of illicit drugs into the United States, and were protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels," Zambada's lawyers wrote as part of his defence. "Indeed, the Unites States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel."
Note:The US helped arm and finance the Sinaloa cartel for decades, which was barely covered in the American media. For more, read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs.
A former U.S. Special Forces officer and ordained Christian minister, [Dave Eubank] ... is a diehard humanitarian who has risked his life time and again to help the most vulnerable in a forsaken place that most Americans can't find on a map. [He] started the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) in the late 1990s to provide medical care and aid to people resisting the Southeast Asian nation's military junta, a brutal dictatorship that has crushed dissent and oppressed ethnic minorities for seven decades in what is the world's longest-running civil war. Eubank [leads] an all-volunteer staff of ethnic minorities and foreigners – many of them ex-military, teachers, students, engineers, poets, and shopkeepers – working on the front line. On missions, the Rangers bring gifts and entertainment to brighten the lives of the children living in harm's way. With his own wife and kids in tow, Eubank set FBR apart with a relentless commitment to go places other humanitarian groups would not. And that's built FBR into a movement that fields teams and tracks human-rights abuses across Burma's front lines and beyond, from northern Syria to Sudan. "You could be a murderer. You only have to say â€I don't think that's the best behavior, and I'm trying not to do those things,' and then you can join us," [Eubank] says, adding that FBR includes atheists, agnostics, and spirit worshipers. Eubank insists that love is the force that drives him to take extreme risks, and also what makes FBR so effective. "[You will] run forward through the bullets, even if you don't know the person you're trying to save," he says. "If I'm shot and I'm bleeding out on the trail and dying and I can't see my wife and kids again – if I'm not doing that for love, what a disaster."
Note: Check out their powerful work in action on their Youtube channel. The Free Burma Rangers are featured in our latest video on healing the war machine.
As war rages between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, it is hard to envision an end to the conflict. For decades, though, a growing movement of Palestinian and Israeli women has not only envisioned a peaceful coexistence, but also demanded it. Just three days before Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack, thousands of women from two peacebuilding groups gathered at Jerusalem's Tolerance Monument. Israelis from Women Wage Peace carried blue flags, and Palestinians from Women of the Sun flew yellow ones. Members of the two groups traveled to the Dead Sea–believed since ancient times to have healing qualities–and set a table. Women from both sides pulled up chairs as a symbol of a good-faith resumption of negotiations to reach a political solution."We, Palestinian and Israeli mothers, are determined to stop the vicious cycle of bloodshed," reads the preamble to their campaign, the Mother's Call. This campaign ... involved aligning around a single agenda that demands a political solution within a limited time frame. They set the table to show the importance of dialogue and women's involvement in decision-making. Ensuring women's participation isn't about equity or fairness. It's about winning the peace. A quantitative analysis of 156 peace agreements over time ... found that when women are decision-makers–serving as negotiators and mediators–the probability of an agreement lasting at least two years increased by 20 percent.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing the war machine.
Seeds of Peace has, for over 30 years, been bringing young people together across lines of difference from the United States and more than 25 other countries. Over 8,000 of these young leaders have now spent part of a summer at the Seeds of Peace Camp, engaging face-to-face in the hard work of dialogue. Connection is an antidote to division and violence. Instead of avoiding or attacking those you disagree with, seek out opportunities to go deeper. Enter conversations with genuine curiosity and practice ways to regulate your body and emotions in order to stay open to listening, even when met with opinions with which you fiercely disagree. Polarization typically results in pressure to take sides: to be â€pro' one group necessitates being â€anti' the other. The goal of dialogue isn't to validate all sides but to increase our capacity to hold multiple truths and redefine the â€sides' altogether. Any path forward will require us to first imagine beyond our current realities. Seeds of Peace creates spaces like our camp that allow us to imagine and practice a version of the future that has yet to be born into existence. Doing so is messy and often challenging, but it also expands our ideas for what's possible and inspires people to work towards realizing it in their communities. As our alumni declared upon returning home after experiencing living together, "We refuse to accept what is when we know what can be." "The wish to not have to deal with the other is an illusion," wrote one of our alumni in the Middle East recently. "And I hope this realization becomes a source of strength rather than weakness. That inevitably, we have to find a way to make this work for all of us. Otherwise, it will work for none of us."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ... threw out the Federal Communication Commission's Net Neutrality rules, rejecting the agency's authority to protect broadband consumers and handing phone and cable companies a major victory. The FCC moved in April 2024 to restore Net Neutrality and the essential consumer protections that rest under Title II of the Communications Act, which had been gutted under the first Trump administration. This was an all-too-rare example in Washington of a government agency doing what it's supposed to do: Listening to the public and taking their side against the powerful companies that for far too long have captured ... D.C. And the phone and cable industry did what they always do when the FCC does anything good: They sued to overturn the rules. The court ruled against the FCC and deemed internet access to be an "information service" largely free from FCC oversight. This court's warped decision scraps the common-sense rules the FCC restored in April. The result is that throughout most of the country, the most essential communications service of this century will be operating without any real government oversight, with no one to step in when companies rip you off or slow down your service. This ruling is far out of step with the views of the American public, who overwhelmingly support real Net Neutrality. They're tired of paying too much, and they hate being spied on.
Note: Read about the communities building their own internet networks in the face of net neutrality rollbacks. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.
Each time you see a targeted ad, your personal information is exposed to thousands of advertisers and data brokers through a process called "real-time bidding" (RTB). This process does more than deliver ads–it fuels government surveillance, poses national security risks, and gives data brokers easy access to your online activity. RTB might be the most privacy-invasive surveillance system that you've never heard of. The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks a company that runs ad auctions to determine which ads it will display for you. This involves sending information about you and the content you're viewing to the ad auction company. The ad auction company packages all the information they can gather about you into a "bid request" and broadcasts it to thousands of potential advertisers. The bid request may contain personal information like your unique advertising ID, location, IP address, device details, interests, and demographic information. The information in bid requests is called "bidstream data" and can easily be linked to real people. Advertisers, and their ad buying platforms, can store the personal data in the bid request regardless of whether or not they bid on ad space. RTB is regularly exploited for government surveillance. The privacy and security dangers of RTB are inherent to its design. The process broadcasts torrents of our personal data to thousands of companies, hundreds of times per day.
Note: Clearview AI scraped billions of faces off of social media without consent and at least 600 law enforcement agencies tapped into its database. During this time, Clearview was hacked and its entire client list – which included the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Interpol, retailers and hundreds of police departments – was leaked to hackers. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his social media platforms – which include Facebook and Instagram – will be getting rid of fact-checking partners and replacing them with a "community notes" model like that found on X. For a decade now, liberals have wrongly treated Trump's rise as a problem of disinformation gone wild, and one that could be fixed with just enough fact-checking. Disinformation, though, has been a convenient narrative for a Democratic establishment unwilling to reckon with its own role in upholding anti-immigrant narratives, or repeating baseless fearmongering over crime rates, and failing to support the multiracial working class. Long dead is the idea that social media platforms like X or Instagram are either trustworthy news publishers, sites for liberatory community building, or hubs for digital democracy. "The internet may once have been understood as a commons of information, but that was long ago," wrote media theorist Rob Horning in a recent newsletter. "Now the main purpose of the internet is to place its users under surveillance, to make it so that no one does anything without generating data, and to assure that paywalls, rental fees, and other sorts of rents can be extracted for information that may have once seemed free but perhaps never wanted to be." Social media platforms are huge corporations for which we, as users, produce data to be mined as a commodity to sell to advertisers – and government agencies. The CEOs of these corporations are craven and power-hungry.
Note: Read a former senior NPR editor's nuanced take on how challenging official narratives became so politicized that "politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that should have been guiding our work." Opportunities for award winning journalism were lost on controversial issues like COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and more. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.
We published the piece on February 22, [2020], under the headline "Don't Buy China's Story: The Coronavirus May Have Leaked from a Lab." It immediately went viral, its audience swelling for a few hours as readers liked and shared it over and over again. I had a data tracker on my screen that showed our web traffic, and I could see the green line for my story surging up and up. Then suddenly, for no reason, the green line dropped like a stone. No one was reading or sharing the piece. It was as though it had never existed at all. Seeing the story's traffic plunge, I was stunned. How does a story that thousands of people are reading and sharing suddenly just disappear? Later, the [New York Post's] digital editor gave me the answer: Facebook's fact-checking team had flagged the piece as "false information." I was seeing Big Tech censorship of the American media in real time, and it chilled me to my bones. What happened next was even more chilling. I found out that an "expert" who advised Facebook to censor the piece had a major conflict of interest. Professor Danielle E. Anderson had regularly worked with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology ... and she told Facebook's fact-checkers that the lab had "strict control and containment measures." Facebook's "fact-checkers" took her at her word. An "expert" had spoken, Wuhan's lab was deemed secure, and the Post's story was squashed in the interest of public safety. In 2021, in the wake of a lawsuit, Facebook admitted that its "fact checks" are just "opinion," used by social media companies to police what we watch and read.
Note: Watch our brief newsletter recap video about censorship and the suppression of the COVID lab leak theory. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook has done "too much censorship" as he revealed the social network is scrapping fact-checking and restrictions on free speech as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House. The 40-year-old tech tycoon – who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago the day before Thanksgiving and gave him a pair of Meta Ray Ban sunglasses, with Meta later donating $1 million to his inaugural fund – claimed on Tuesday that the dramatic about-face was signal that the company is returning to an original focus on free speech. The stunning reversal will include moving Meta's content moderation team from deep-blue California to right-leaning Texas in order to insulate the group from cultural bias. "As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help build trust to do this work in places where there's less concern about the bias of our team," the Meta boss said. Facebook will do away with "restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse," Zuckerberg said. "What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas," he said, adding: "It's gone too far." In late July, Facebook acknowledged that it censored the image of President-elect Donald Trump raising his fist in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
Note: Read a former senior NPR editor's nuanced take on how challenging official narratives became so politicized that "politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that should have been guiding our work." Opportunities for award winning journalism were lost on controversial issues like COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and more. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.